Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/821

 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP yERSUS PUBLIC CONTROL 805

that the electrical equipment of a ferry-boat, which under private contract would have cost only $6,800, cost $10,200. Electrical work in the city building for hospital nurses cost $4,754; by private contract it would have been $1,528. Work on a city armory, which normally would have cost $2,600, absorbed $6,700 of the city's funds. Ice for public drinking-fountains, which private companies were furnishing at $2 to $3 per ton, was costing the city $6.

Political appointees, numerically far in excess of the require- ments of the service, and individually incompetent as a rule, had brought the bureaus to this extravagant pass ; and it was virtually impossible to resist the drift in this direction, because the Common Council would not vote money enough to carry on the work of the departments, unless " places " were made for the favorites of the aldermen, as demanded. Chief Electrician William Brophy, of the Boston Wire Department, reported to Mayor Hart :

A glance at the pay-rolls show that nearly 60 per cent, of the men whose names they contain were appointed at the request of certain prominent gentle- men, who, to say the least, are not the best judges of the necessary qualifica- tions of the employees of this department.

And among these employees, it is hardly necessary to add, there was a more or less general adoption of that leisurely gait which already has come to be known on the state-managed industries in New Zealand as the " government stroke."

Civil-service regulations proved no safeguard against these aldermanic raids, and the efforts to get around the rules were even carried to the extent of supplying a variety of ordinary employ- ments with new and singular names for which no civil-service examinations existed!

On the general question of whether such abuses could be over- come, and a civil-service system devised which would provide a really satisfactory selection of employees for socialistic municipal enterprises, it seems high time to remark that the extent of effectiveness of any civil-service test, where more than somewhat perfunctory service is required, is very easily overestimated. It has become a sort of fetich in the popular mind, to such an extent that very many participants in this line of discussion have made